YOUR FATHER’S VOICE

Letters for Emmy About Life With Jeremy--and Without Him After 9/11

In another poignant addition to the literary legacy of 9/11, a young widow recalls for their infant daughter the father she will never know.

Alternating an account of her experiences after husband Jeremy died on Flight 93 with memories of their first meeting and subsequent relationship, Glick has produced an act of preservation as much as of mourning. Determined that their daughter Emmy, three months old when he died, should know her father, Glick recollects all the details she hopes will give a sense of Jeremy: his love of sport, especially judo, the way he’d sneak out of the house to see his friends, their roller-coaster relationship, and his success as a salesman. She recalls the day in 1984 when she first sat next to him in ninth-grade biology. She disliked Jeremy’s enormous Afro, which she thought made him look like a cannibal, but she enjoyed his sense of humor, and the two soon became friends. They sometimes dated, sometimes broke up for long periods of time, especially in college, but they always stayed in touch, either personally or through Jeremy’s many friends. They married in 1996 and three years later bought a lakeside home in New Jersey, where Glick, who had experienced a number of miscarriages, finally became pregnant with Emmy. As she records their past, she also describes the period following 9/11: her grief; the stress of dealing with the media; interviews with FBI; her several visits to the White House, where she met with President Bush. Therapy sessions joined her with other women who had lost loved ones that day, but nothing really prepared her for such harrowing experiences as receiving Jeremy’s few remains (teeth and a datebook) and listening to the tape from the Flight 93 black box.

An inevitably personal response that serves to remind again how the 9/11 attacks affected the lives of countless ordinary families.